Two common themes in the marketing collateral of vendors providing Customer Management Services (CMS) are the use of analytics and transformation.  For analytics, a popular claim is the use of big data for predictive modeling within contact centers. But is it really happening? The reality is that, while certain vendors are using data for simple predictive modeling, this is still a distinct[...]

It seems like yesterday that the concept of a private health insurance exchange was novel: it’s hard to believe that active exchanges have been available from benefits consultancies for three years, and that retiree exchanges are nearly 11 years old. Here’s a quick update and review of how the private exchange landscape has changed in this short time. Active exchanges are mu[...]

Financial planning for retirement readiness is a big concern for many individuals, and the stress is often magnified the closer one gets to retirement. For years, organizations and DC administration providers have been honing different approaches to address this. One of the biggest challenges in establishing a model that works stems from diversity within the workforce. Earlier approac[...]

During a recent visit to London I had the opportunity to visit the HGS contact center in Chiswick. The 500-seat center is focused on supporting accounts with broad language capability needs and it also provides specialist client programs beyond traditional customer care support. The industry sectors supported from the center include automotive, consumer packaged goods (CPG), government, and health[...]

Demand for learning services has been the lowest of all the HR outsourcing services over the last few years. But while the market has been in a lull, several suppliers have taken the time to revamp their learning services businesses in one of two ways. The first approach is about honing learning offerings around one specific learning function. Sometimes this is about refining one func[...]

By Vicki Jenkins and Mike Cook A year ago Convergys acquired fellow contact center vendor Stream, making it the second largest CMS BPS provider by revenue behind Teleperformance. NelsonHall CMS analysts Vicki Jenkins and Mike Cook caught up with key members of Convergys’ leadership team on the anniversary of the acquisition to discuss how the new organization is shaping up. The importa[...]

What a difference a year makes for EXL. It entered 2014 under the cloud of the loss of two contracts, including the unfortunate termination Travelers (which had accounted for nearly 10% of total revenues in 2013) because of inappropriate behavior by an employee. So it started the year facing significant revenue headwinds. A year later, EXL delivered full year 2014 revenues that beat revise[...]

STARTEK has announced results for Q4 2014 and full year 2014. Q4 2014 Revenues were $64.2m, up 1.2% y/y LBIT was $1.5m, a negative margin of 2.4%, down 98 bps y/y. Full year 2014: Revenues were $250.1m, up 8.1% LBIT was $4.9m, a negative margin of 2%, up 72 bps. Q4 revenue contribution from largest clients was: T-Mobile: 30.6% AT&T: 19.6% Comcast 15.7%. [...]

Barely two months into the year and there has been lots of activity across the benefits administration market, including new contracts, contract expansions, and M&A activity.  Contracts have come out of the U.S. and Europe, including the U.K. and the Netherlands. U.S. activity has come from both the private and public sectors, with deals ranging from as few as 800 employees to mor[...]

Germany’s fiscal success story presents an interesting value proposition for the local customer management services (CMS) BPO market. Real GDP in Germany grew by 1.5% in 2014 and current forecasts indicate that, driven by a strong labor force, high consumption and favorable energy prices, Germany should be able to maintain this level of growth through 2015 and accelerate to around the 2.0% m[...]

By Amy Gurchensky, Liz Rennie and Gary Bragar With total HRO service growth in the high single digits in 2014, service providers are growing both organically and inorganically to meet clients’ needs. The primary reasons for M&A and partnerships across HRO service lines were to enhance service delivery capability (60%) and support geographic expansion (40%). Here we take a closer look [...]

I recently visited San Pedro Sula, Honduras, with CMS vendor Alorica. This nearshore America delivery location offers a low cost, educated workforce with strong native neutral Spanish delivery, as well as emerging support for English and Portuguese. The country is in the process of making English its official second language. Honduras, and specifically the city of San Pedro Sula, have battled n[...]

NelsonHall, the leading global BPO and IT outsourcing analyst firm, has today launched a new tool to assist strategic sourcing managers in assessing vendor capability in Property & Casualty Insurance BPO for the automotive sector. The NelsonHall Vendor Evaluation and Assessment Tool (NEAT) for P&C BPO in the automotive sector is now available to NelsonHall clients, and is also available[...]

In the last twelve months we have more customer management services (CMS) BPO investment in South Africa, including  Webhelp setting up centers in Cape Town and Johannesburg with an agent headcount approaching 1,000 Capita transitioning part of its O2 support to Cape Town in the form of a ~1,400 seat operation. One (of many) attributes that make South Afr[...]

So far, 2014 has been a mixed year for Quindell; it faced damning speculation from Gotham City Research in April (which has since been rejected) and a failed partnership with the RAC in September, which would have seen ingenie’s telematics services being made available to all drivers, not just 17 to 25 year olds, from July. On the plus side, there has also been a number of signi[...]

NelsonHall recently attended Sitel’s analyst day and client advisory board meeting in Las Vegas, where I had the opportunity to discuss CMS market trends. Click here to view a brief video. Sitel wants to be known for creating great experiences, and its focus now is ‘people first’. It recently hired a new chief HR officer, Elsa Zambrano, who has created a new executiv[...]

Concerns have been expressed about the future of the traditional benefits administration market with the advent of private health insurance exchanges: will the market move from a B2B model to a B2C where benefits administration as we know it will disappear?  Rest assured, while the benefits administration market will undergo some transformation, it will not disappear entirely for the follo[...]

NelsonHall recently attended CSS Corp’s analyst day and OneWorld conference. The overriding theme of the day was a reinforcement of the company’s direction; CEO Tiger Ramesh emphasized his ambition for CSS Corp to become the leading global tech support service provider, as emphasized in the company’s new by-line “Wired to Support”. A new leadership team has been [...]

NIIT is set to launch its latest offering to the insurance market next week, in the form of an upgraded policy and claims administration system which will join its existing set of insurance tools. NIIT has delivered IT services to its Lloyds of London clients for some 20-years, using its insurance specific tools: Subscribe: NIIT’s existing policy administration platform, a multi-cur[...]

Last week, ADP hosted its 6th annual analyst day at its new Innovation Lab in NYC.  The space, partly still under construction and featuring a rooftop garden, provides a very collaborative work environment. A current focus at the Lab is creating a new user experience for HR processes. The new user experience for pre-onboarding is live in Vantage HCM, and the benefits en[...]